Daren Bakst writes at StarNews Online: ‘Extremists’ push wind power regardless of the cost

Mr. Bask, in his article focusing on North Carolina suggests, “While most attention has focused on mountain ridgelines, there’s been little focus on massive industrial wind turbines on the coast. There’s nothing equivalent to the Ridge Law for coastal communities.

Imagine lines of wind turbines, the height of 50-story skyscrapers, located a couple miles off the shore. That’s the future for North Carolina unless coastal communities are protected. This is precisely what’s happening now off the coast of Nantucket.”

Jon Boone, of Stop Ill Wind, takes this further and views the entire Appalachian region suggesting we consider a scenario that places “massive wind projects stretching from Maryland through Virginia and West Virginia, down through the mountains of North and South Carolina.

Let’s say there were 3000, 2.5MW wind turbines providing a combined installed capacity of 7000MW. Because their performance would be a function of the cube of the wind speed, they would be continuously skittering between zero and, extremely rarely, their installed capacity. Together, their likely capacity factor would be 25%, meaning that their actual output would produce an annual average of around 1800MW to a grid that generates over 140,000MW at peak demand times. Sixty percent of the time, the aggregate wind projects would produce less than 1800MW; around 20 percent of the time, they would produce 700MW or less. Around 10 percent of the time, they would produce nothing, particularly at peak demand times. Always they would be changing their production from one minute to the next, unpredictably. Occasionally, they would produce wide swings of energy, increasing in one hour, say, from producing 50MW, to, in the next hour, 5000MW–and vice versa. All this would threaten grid security by commandeering the grid’s marginal reserves.

Coal and natural gas generators would have to be entangled with the wind generation and these would actually provide around 75 percent of the wind projects’ installed capacity. Since they would be operating inefficiently to follow and balance the continuous wind flux–remember, supply and demand must be balanced at all times–the harsh truth is that the wind projects would induce more net CO2 emissions than would be the case without any wind at all. And the need for more coal and natural gas consumption.

In terms of the expectations of those who support the idea, wind technology wholly subverts their goals. It really is the dumbest modern energy idea imaginable. And this dysfunctional production would require 600 miles of terrain and would likely clearcut 60,000 acres. To coin a phrase, “What hath God wrought” with this kind of pretension?”

For a comprehensive review of industrial wind issues, please visit Stop Ill Wind.  Specific to this discussion, it is highly recommended that you read Mr. Boone’s essays: Why Wind Won’t Work and The Wind Technology Scam.